MOTION OF THE BOW DURING AIMING AND RELEASING THE SHOT

Abstract

The range of motion of a recurve bow during aiming and releasing the shot is very small. Thus on-target-trajectories are used. To measure the on-target-trajectories of bows a system originally designed for gun shooting was modified. The system can be fitted onto the archer’s personal bow. 15 highly skilled archers of the German National Teams of women and men participated in the study. Two intraindividual typical strategies of aiming were found: 11 archers try to hold the aim on sight for at least 2 seconds whereas 4 archers tend to “slide” on the target and release the shot at once when the target is on sight. For 14 of 15 archers the “hold boxes” disclose an asymmetry in aiming: The horizontal magnitude of the hold box is larger than the vertical dimension. From release to when the arrow leaves the string, the right handed archers tend to move to the left and the left handed archers tend to move right.